Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Cantalupo

Europe shows up here less as a place than as a lever. Jim Cantalupo is talking in the clipped, spreadsheet dialect of a CEO, but the line is doing something more strategic: it reframes “performance” as a story about currency and footprint, not just hamburgers and foot traffic. By making the euro’s devaluation the hinge point, he’s implicitly insulating the business from a simpler, harsher reading (maybe the U.S. market is saturated; maybe the concept travels unevenly; maybe growth has limits). If the numbers disappoint, blame the exchange rate, not the model.

The tantalizing provocation is the counterfactual: “if the euro hadn’t devalued.” It’s a classic executive move, appealing to an alternate reality where management’s decisions were already vindicated. That hypothetical also flatters the European operation: half the stores, equal money, higher returns. Europe becomes the efficiency fantasy - proof that disciplined expansion can beat brute-scale American sprawl. “Returns were higher” is the quiet punch line, the metric that matters to investors and boards, the one that sanctifies strategy.

Context matters because Cantalupo led McDonald’s through a period when “global growth” was both promise and pressure, and currency swings could turn real operational wins into disappointing reported earnings. He’s signaling competence in two directions at once: to analysts, that he understands macroeconomic headwinds; to internal teams, that international markets aren’t just side quests but engines of profitability. The subtext is clear: judge us on what we can control, and remember that the best version of this story already exists - it’s just trapped behind the exchange rate.